1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for managing a recording area used by an application.
2. Description of the Related Art
By storing (saving) the progress status of game play in a recording device, a user can later play a game starting from where the user left off last time using game data stored in the recording device. Conventionally, game devices have been suggested, for the purpose of preventing easy duplication of save data, that add status information indicating the status of an execution environment of a game program to game data at the time of saving the game data and that determine whether the current status information matches the status information added to the save data at the time of loading the save data.
[Patent document No. 1] US Patent Publication No. 2009/0258712
Game programs are distributed and sold in the form of a recording medium. Conventionally, since a game program is recorded in a ROM medium, save data cannot be written in a recording medium. However, a writable recording area, when provided in a recording medium in which a game program is recorded, allows save data to be written. With the development of the Internet in recent years, an environment has been arranged where game programs are distributed to user terminal via the Internet from game servers. Game makers can then sell game programs that were sold in the form of a recording medium in the beginning by distributing the game programs form the game servers.
A game program downloaded onto a user terminal is installed in a large-capacity recording device. Thus, capacity that can be used for a game to record save data necessarily increases. However, if save data is attempted to be recorded substantially without any limitation in a large-capacity recording device for a game installed originally in a recording medium, it is not sure whether the game will operate in a normal way. Therefore, it is necessary for the game maker to remaster download-type game programs, in this case. This remastering imposes a burden on the game maker. Therefore, regardless of whether the game programs are of recording-medium type or download type, it is desirable to be able to sell the same game programs without performing remastering.